The Present As...
It seems like African contemporaneity is often imagined, talked about, and conceived as moving in between one thing and the other. Its histories (broadly addressed as pre- and during colonialism) and its future (there was not long ago a raving excitement of afrofuturism), between geographies (an here and a there) and inevitably between cultures (a local and a global), between identities (afropolitan, global citizen, cosmopolitan, yoruba, Swahili), and between political states, economic fluxes, and spiritual understanding of self.
Speaking of the future, writer and curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung at the 2015 African Future Festival, Johannesburg (later published as African Futures: Thinking about the future in word and image) asked; “What is this sudden interest in futurism and the future, especially related to the African continent but also globally? I have been asking myself what is behind it... Is there a possibility that he [we] kept on talking about the future to evade talking about the present? My point is this: what are we trying to skip in not talking about the present, and not talking about the past?”
This exhibition asks what is to be found in considering the present as is; beyond a portal to the past and a springboard for the future - a dense, active space where histories, futures, identities, commodities, bodies, and geographies coexist? What's in the present beyond memories of the past, and ideas and directions for the future? The Present As… Movement For one, the present is characterised by movement.
As the multidisciplinary artist Emeka Okereke says, the story of Africa is one of journeys. Indeed, Africa and Africans are constantly journeying; moving and becoming mutable. Using movement as one such proposition of constituencies of the present within the larger exhibition, viewers are invited to consider the popular, inexpensive, Chinese-made plastic weave bag as an icon par excellence indexing migration; the conditions that necessitate it, the conditions it creates and the potentialities that it holds for the future.
As a marker for the transnational, global, intra and intercontinental movement of Africans in the present, the exhibition invites the artists to respond to the bags, well known to Africans and the globe at large through mimicking, extensions, reimagination, subversion or activation. It asks the artists to consider the histories of the plastic bag, its functionalities, relationships contained within it, and its several representations for the present. The bag is known by different names across the world, often through names that associate it with working-class, migrant, or refugee communities. In Nigeria, it is called “Ghana Must Go,” a recalling of the 1983 exile of Ghanaian nationals from the country. In the UK, it is called Bangladeshi Bag, reflective of Bangladeshi immigrants. In Germany, it is called the Türkenkoffer (Turkish suitcase). It is called Chinaman tote in America, the Amah bag in Hong Kong, the Guyanese Samsonite in the Caribbean, the Shangaan or Zimbabwe Bag in South Africa, and Osuofia in Kenya/Uganda. However, regardless of the representative names of the bag that suggest migration, refugeeship, and survival, it is found in many African homes as storage materials.
In the NoViolet Bulawayo's “We Need New Names” fashion, both continental, diaspora and global creative entities from Obinna Obioma, Phoebe Philo to Balenciaga have also made efforts to appropriate or reclaim the bag. The bag is evocative of migratory histories and present, rapid movements and continuous settlements, purported disposability of African bodies within global trends, resituationships, geopolitical and economic struggles of the working class. It therefore serves as a starting point through which the exhibition considers the present as a space of simultaneous and sometimes contradictory conditions: movement and staying, utility and aesthetics, stigma and value, individuality and collectivity, locality and circulation. The artists are invited to consider what can emerge from these conditions.
Another proposition for the present includes The Present as… a condition in which the present is considered beyond its temporal understandings but manifested as a complex intersection of physical geopolitical, globalised, technological, cross cultural and infrastructural realities. Other propositions include the present as… a site of inquiry, the present as… a site of expression, etc. The exhibition leaves the present as an open-ended space where further propositions can be generated. The Present As… proposes the present as a field that is continually encountered and reformulated; as movement, condition, expression, inquiry, memory, labour, desire, pleasure, contradiction, or otherwise. These propositions alongside many others overlap, contradict and remain open to further articulation through the works themselves. Bringing together artists working across painting, mixed media, installation and sculpture, The Present As considers the simultaneous constancy and mutability of the present.
The exhibiting artists include Tochukwu Orazulike, Wisdom Uche, Putin Ofori Bempong, Joseph Kojo Hoggar, Paulcy Odama, Snelihle Maphumulo, and Oluchi Anaghoba. Wisdom Uche contrasts notions of family with the encroaching reality of solitude that symptomises our contemporaneity. Combining figurative style with neoexpressionism, and having the postured body with a palette of whimsical emoticons for a face, the works leave us to contemplate and infer the implied dispositions and relationships of the portrayed figures. Interested in disrupting certainty, Tochukwu Orazulike ruptures the unknowability of the future [no one knows tomorrow] by presenting today as its own distinct orchestra of enigmas. In two of the works in the show, the artist acknowledges a current that has led to the present while asking urgently and poignantly “Where do we go from here?” The bag, an allegory for potential continuous mobility of the present remains closed, inscrutable to us.
Finding purpose for archival materials often marked for destruction or abandoned, combining layered images with organic matter, paint and locally sourced materials, Putin Ofori Bempong becomes an inquisitor for the future, investigating, revealing, and reporting the present’s complicity in the destruction of the future. Among swaths of debates and discourses regarding cultural originaries, authenticities and appropriation, Joseph Kojo Hoggar’s installation “Material Study II” uses African wax prints to consider the mobility, intersection, blending and blurring of cultures and identities into a hybrid entities sometimes difficult to fractionalise into distinct originaries. This hybrid bonding is further complicated and intensified by current global circuits of trade, trans and cross cultural exchange and cyberspace communication and conduits. Paulcy Odama’s work is rooted in reflexive inquisition about the notions of self which are constructed by deliberate rubrics and subconscious structures within which childhood has been lived and experienced.
Combining materials such as earth, clay, charcoal, paint, and gauze, Odama uses the fundamental human experience of play to explore imbibed systems, ideas and philosophies that continue to bear significance to present being and life. Inioluwa Aboluwarin’s works between new stories that takes inspiration from current mundane realities and historical events, moving fluidly between true life, fantasies, and myths derived from a multiplicity of geographies as he reimagines them in the present and casts his cultural sensibilities and alignments onto them. Snelihle Maphumulo’s work carries the poignant potential for transformation of the symbolism of materials. Working with materials such as cow and sheep hide which she cuts, laser engraves and layers within an installation based practice, she moves from the traditional, ancestral and inherited to the signification of her Christian faith. The work recalls the importance of the material iconography with both belief systems and the contain tensions between both. Her practice is a continuous negotiation of inheritance and new possibilities as identity, belief and belonging unfurls.
Oluchi Anaghoba’s submission revolves around the ethnoreligious conflicts she experienced growing up and the continued occurrence of the violence. Although she has since moved, she reflects on the persistence of violent landscapes and its affect on memory and the psyche across time and geographies.
VIEW CATALOGUE : https://canva.link/72g3txu1z7d453m
